Outstanding Scientific Paper Award for Maarten Krol and Wouter Peters

Maarten Krol and Wouter Peters received the "Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Outstanding Scientific Paper Award 2008" for their paper "An atmospheric perspective on North American carbon dioxide exchange: CarbonTracker". This prestigious award is attributed by the American National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

The outstanding paper is available for download HERE

The article, published in PNAS, was evaluated by a team of reviewers, who paid special attention to originality, academic importance, applicability and readability. The article was selected as one of the nine price winners out of 74 publications. In their article, Peters, Krol and their co-authors present an estimation of the net CO₂ exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere above North-America per week for the period 2000-2005. This estimate was made with the data assimilation system CarbonTracker. Wouter Peters: “In the near future we expect to be able to present the European counterpart of the described CarbonTracker system.” A summary of the article can be found below.

“We present an estimate of net CO₂ exchange between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere across North America for every week in the period 2000 through 2005. This estimate is derived from a set of 28,000 CO₂ mole fraction observations in the global atmosphere that are fed into a state-of-the-art data assimilation system for CO₂ called CarbonTracker. By design, the surface fluxes produced in CarbonTracker are consistent with the recent history of CO₂ in the atmosphere and provide constraints on the net carbon flux independent from national inventories derived from accounting efforts. We find the North American terrestrial biosphere to have absorbed –0.65 PgC/yr (1 petagram = 10^15 g; negative signs are used for carbon sinks) averaged over the period studied, partly offsetting the estimated 1.85 PgC/yr release by fossil fuel burning and cement manufacturing. Uncertainty on this estimate is derived from a set of sensitivity experiments and places the sink within a range of –0.4 to –1.0 PgC/yr. The estimated sink is located mainly in the deciduous forests along the East Coast (32%) and the boreal coniferous forests (22%). Terrestrial uptake fell to –0.32 PgC/yr during the large-scale drought of 2002, suggesting sensitivity of the contemporary carbon sinks to climate extremes. CarbonTracker results are in excellent agreement with a wide collection of carbon inventories that form the basis of the first North American State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR), to be released in 2007. All CarbonTracker results are freely available at http://carbontracker.noaa.gov.”

The outstanding paper is available for download HERE